Connection-based quality of service (QoS) management with scheduling-based media access control mechanisms may be provided in wireless communications. For example, in Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.16, an 802.16 medium access control (MAC) may provide connection-based QoS management with scheduling-based media access control mechanisms. For the uplink (UL), subscribers may signal their UL resource needs for each UL connection/service flow, and the base station may grant the UL resource to a subscriber. The base station grant, however, may not be responsive to each individual connection/service flow. In other words, the UL resource requests may be per connection, and the UL resource allocations may be per subscriber station. This may be performed to minimize the resource allocation overhead by having allocation map (MAP) information elements (IE) allocate the resources for multiple connections of a subscriber, and/or to provide flexibility for the subscriber to make efficient and effective use of the allocated UL resources. For example, this may allow the subscriber to fill the allocated resource by concatenating MAC data from multiple connections and may also allow the subscriber to perform real-time adjustments.
There may be some cases where UL allocation per connection, (also called per flow) may be beneficial. For example, the advanced base station (ABS) may allocate UL resources to an advanced mobile station (AMS) based on the base station's knowledge about the WTRU's UL traffic needs of its active connections, for example, amount of data, delay tolerance, and the like, and the real-time UL traffic loading of the base station. For an UL allocation, the base station may have its own intention regarding how the UL allocation should be distributed among the active connections of the WTRU. However, with the typical 802.16 per-station UL allocation, the intended information of the base station may not be available to the WTRU. It would therefore be desirable to provision such information to the AMS to help the AMS to achieve a better synchronization with the base station about the bandwidth requests and grants for each connection. This may reduce the probability of the fragmentation and may also reduce the need of sending aggregate bandwidth request to do self-corrections in the UL bandwidth request/grant process. Thus the control overhead and processing load may be reduced so that the system efficiency may be improved.
Methods for providing UL allocation per flow/connection and per station may be needed in order to improve the UL control efficiency and also to improve utilization of the UL resources.